


Angel by the Wings

by awkwardacity



Series: Secret Santas 2016 [2]
Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Chloe Decker has wings, F/M, May Become a Series, Self Confidence Issues, Self-Harm, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Unresolved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-26
Updated: 2016-12-26
Packaged: 2018-09-11 11:13:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8977360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/awkwardacity/pseuds/awkwardacity
Summary: Her parents go on about soul marks like they're the best thing a person can have.It's all right for them - all they have is a shared birth mark. Chloe has wings.[Deckerstar Angst for alwayshalloweenchan on tumblr for the Lucifer Secret Santa exchange]





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Halloweenchan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Halloweenchan/gifts).



Her parents are paired by a mark on their lower backs. It's shaped like a butterfly, the intricacies of its wings drawn in pain-staking detail in a way that can make it nothing other than a soul mark - no matter that it's that pinkish-brown most associate with birth marks. When she's young, Chloe takes joy in tracing the wings simultaneously, searching for the slightest of variations between the two; there aren't any, of course.

Her parents are so in love it makes her heart ache.

They tell her soul marks are a gift - _not everyone has one, Chloe._ Her mark makes her unique, and special, and a million other positive words that Chloe refuses to remember, because all they have is a fucking _birth mark_.

Chloe has _wings_. Not an image of wings - not a birth mark, or a tattoo, or a couple of feathers sticking out of her shoulder blades; actual, honest to god _wings_. Masses of needle-like bones and glossy white feathers stretching out from her back, marking her apart from everyone else, making her _special_.

At first she doesn't think there's anything wrong with them; she believes her parents bullshit lies. So what if no one else has them? She stretches them out and runs around the house, flapping them occasionally in an attempt to lift off from the ground. It never works, of course, but the delighted gasps from her parents and their friends make it all worth it. She never notices the whispered words of concern until she's much older.

On the first day of school her mother gets her ready, binds her wings tightly to her back with bandages. They're at an awkward angle, and she can feel the bones digging against her back, the feathers being rumpled and crushed. She cries all the way to the gate.

She lasts almost a week before some of the bigger kids decide she looks weak enough to take a beating. She's drawing - a house with a wavy garden path and an apple tree in the yard, a mother and father holding hands, a small girl with wings perched on the chimney - when they shove her off the bench. The red crayon in her hand jerks, splitting the page with a gruesome line as she falls.

Her palms sting, and her head aches - and then they shove her again, and she hears the crunch and crack of bones snapping, and the world is suddenly on fire with a pain she can barely comprehend.

She wakes up in a hospital bed, her wings spread out and held up in a sling.

Life continues as normal for everyone else, but from then on at school the whispers begin. She's Bird Brains, and Chicken Legs, and Rooster Girl, and a whole heap of other names which she desperately tries to pretend don't phase her, but they _do_ \- every single damn one. They cut at her like knives, pulling her apart at the seams.

It takes them years to heal fully, but once they do she stands in front of the mirror in her room, stretches them out for the first time in ages. She can almost hear the creak and groan of protesting bones, but it feels so good to have them unfurled finally that everything else slips away. They easily reach the walls of her bedroom, so that if she tries to turn she'll get stuck. She furls them inwards, outwards, watching in fascination as the feathers rustle and shift to accommodate the movement.

She reaches up and tugs experimentally at one of them - she's wanted to for years, wants to rip out every damn glowing thing from her back until there's nothing left-

The pain is so blinding she blacks out. The first time, at least. The pain seems to lessen over time, or maybe her threshold is simply rising with every attempt - whatever it is, she only screams slightly when she tugs the first feather out when she's twelve.

By the time she's fourteen most of the feathers are gone. Her wings ache constantly, but the sting simply reminds her of why she's ridding herself of them. Binding them is easier, more comfortable. The whispers and nicknames vanish steadily until, one day, she's _Chloe Decker_ again.

Rooster Girl was pathetic and weak, Chloe reasons. Shielding herself with excuses and misery to hide her own drawbacks and uselessness. Chloe Decker is confident and relatively popular, the prize of the drama society and track team simultaneously. So what if she also has wings which hang limply at her sides no matter how hard she pushes and stretches, sparse of feathers; the few that remain cling desperately to their frame, tinged black and dull.

It's not enough.

She's fifteen when Adam Griffiths leaves her on the dance floor at the winter formal, leaving behind the echo of venomous words in her ears whilst everyone around her stares, and repeats those words, until they roar louder than her thundering heart. Her wings are revolting, ugly - _she's_ revolting, and ugly, and there's only one way to solve all her problems.

She's in hospital for a month because of it; the damage is extensive, the blood loss and trauma enough to give every doctor a run for their money.

She smashes her wings. Shatters them entirely, every single inch of bone reduced to shards which twist and dig deep into her flesh. There's blood everywhere; she can feel it dripping down her back, slicking her hands, matting in her hair. The air fills with a choked mix of screams and sobs, her vision swimming. She desperately grapples with unconsciousness, begging her mind to release her into its embrace, but her body is at war with itself, and she remains in agony.

Her parents return from the movies to find their daughter in a pool of her own blood, whimpering nonsensical snatches of words to the walls. She vaguely remembers her mothers screams - they split the night, waking up half the neighbourhood.

The doctors only see one course of actions: to amputate the wings. Just as she hoped.

She wakes the day after the procedure; everything is light and fuzzy at the edges, and her limbs feel like they're made of lead. But she's lying down on the hospital bed - flat on her back, for the first time in her life. She cries for the whole morning, desperate, violent sobs which claw at her heart and throat. She never thought she'd miss them, but now when she reaches her hands out, expecting to find delicate bone and velvet feathers she finds nothing but air. When she moves her shoulder blades, she can still feel their weight on her back momentarily, can still feel the ache that used to reach all the way to the tips.

When she returns home from the hospital, after countless check ups and psych evaluations, she goes straight to the mirror. All that's left of her wings are two wide crescent shaped scars on her back, deep and red and ugly. The still stain the bandages when she moves too much.

She wonders about her soulmate, sometimes. As she grows older without the burden of her wings to drag her down - she gets straight As, leads the cross country team to state victory; she's cast in a movie, much to her mother's pride - she can't help but let her thoughts wonder to her other half. Have they learned to live with their wings? Have they got rid of them, too? Did they feel every bit of pain Chloe did when she destroyed her soul mark? She shudders to think of the last one.

She finds herself apprehensive at the thought of ever meeting her soulmate, of going under their scrutiny. The idea of being forced to love someone makes her sick, yet she's terrified of what they'd think of her and what she did.

She's nineteen when the movie is filmed and released. _Hot Tub High School_ \- not winning any awards for creativity or originality, but she enjoys working on it, and one of the women in the makeup trailer covers up her scars every morning before filming, so when they ask her to do the scene topless she says yes before thinking it through - because confidence is a new fit on her, yet she slips into it like a second skin.

Her father dies just a few weeks after the film's release. She returns home from an audition for a new film to find her mother on the floor, in the exact same place Chloe herself lay four years previously, sobbing as she clutches at her back. Chloe rushes to her, pulling her hands away long enough to see the freshly bleeding mark - an intricate butterfly as it's always been, now painted in crimson.

Half an hour later the phone rings, but Chloe doesn't need to answer it to know that her father is dead.

She's never believed much in the idea of love, but her father's death drives this to a whole new level. Her mother is catatonic for almost a whole year afterwards, and Chloe throws all her focus into joining the police academy, then the LAPD - and there she meets Dan. He's nice, and funny, and before she knows it she's tripped and fallen for him. It takes her two years to use the L-word, but still.

She asks him if he has a soul mark one day; he doesn't, and she breathes a sigh of relief. He asks her the same: _I used to_ , she replies, and they never bring up the subject again.

Beatrice "Trixie" Espinoza is born on a bright day in April, and Chloe cries for the first time since her father died. The girl in her arms is so tiny, so vulnerable and innocent from the horror show life has to offer. She promises herself in that moment, as her daughter clutches at her finger with spasming hands, that nothing will harm her baby so long as she breathes. Trixie won't have to go through what she did.

She checks for a soul mark at the first available opportunity, and finds herself crying once again when she doesn't find one.

She's twenty-nine when she first feels it. Life carries on so normally now that on occasion she manages to entirely forget her wings ever existed. She wakes this time however to pins and needles in her back, like static shocks sparking around her scars. Her stomach turns, and she throws up what's left of last night's dinner, but the feeling persists all the way until the evening - and all at once, it stops.

She expects something - anything - to happen. For her soulmate to come barging in through the door yelling love poetry, or an angel with glossy white wings to descend from the heavens; neither of these events occur. She finds herself waiting, day dreaming out of the window absentmindedly, but still nothing happens. Life passes by; she and Dan decide to go on a break, Trixie goes to school. Chloe even manages to make an enemy of every single cop in her department by accusing one of their own of corruption.

Delilah Matthews is murdered when Chloe is thirty-four, and the safe, normal bubble she's created for herself shatters.

His name is Lucifer Morningstar. He's an arrogant, annoying, charismatically handsome asshole, and she wants to punch him in his perfect white teeth from the moment she meets him. There's something in his eyes, she thinks - something deep and bottomless, accompanied by a wisdom that can only come from suffering, all hidden away behind an easy smile and careless attitude. But her scars feel like they're on fire; she can barely stand three minutes in his presence before she has to excuse herself.

He follows her around for the rest of the day anyway, and the pain in her shoulders gradually lessens.

She locks herself in the bathroom later, her thoughts spinning faster than she can process them. Emotions rage like fighting tides inside her - relief, and joy, and excitement warring against fear and disgust, and disbelief. Her life is stable, and _good_ , and she's finally at a place where she can forget that wings and soulmates ever existed in the first place. And of all the people, life sends her - what? A suspiciously good-looking guy who thinks he's got super powers? Who thinks he's _the devil_?

Maybe that would explain the wings, she thinks, hysterical laughter bubbling past her lips before she can stop it.

Why couldn't she be born without a soul mark? She would trade this so-called true love for a simple life any day; in her experience it causes nothing but pain and misery.

She decides to research him, watch him from a distance - treat it like any other investigation, and above all not get attached. After all, he hasn't made any indication that he's noticed the same signs as her. For all she knows, she's just jumping at ghosts, and there's nothing to be afraid of.

But then she's shot - it's painful, punching through skin and flesh and blood, but she's felt so much worse - and Lucifer Morningstar saves her life. He even shows up at the hospital afterwards, and talking with him is - natural. They throw words back and forth at each other in perfect synchronicity - none of the stilted awkwardness she's suffered through with most of the people she knows in the beginning.

"I look forward to seeing you again," he says as he leaves, with that enigmatic smile of his.

"I don't," she calls back - and for what feels like the first time in her life, she's lying.

After that, she can't seem to get rid of him, and her carefully thought out plan goes straight out the window. He pushes all of her buttons, and she _still_ wants to punch him, but before where he was sarcastic and flippant, he's become teasing and warm. There's an intrigue in his eyes, which seem to follow her everywhere she goes, as if she's suddenly worth his attention. She doesn't know what she did - and she finds she doesn't particularly care.

There are things, though, that don't quite add up about him. The fact that there should be an array of bullet holes in his chest, for example. His complete disregard for things such as societal norms and the law. He's an anomaly, an unknown element she can't help but investigate.

She visits the man who shot her in prison; he's catatonic until she mentions Lucifer - then he's psychotic. The window between them rattles as his head crashes into it, blood spraying all over the glass. Screams echo in her head for days: _he's the devil_.

Then Lucifer throws a man through a window with _one fucking arm_ , and the small grip she's begun to regain on reality slips once more from her grasp. There's a pure rage, hot and unrelenting, to Lucifer that she hasn't seen before, and she's never seen anything so terrifying. Her blood chills just looking at him, and she thinks - just for a moment - that he really could be the devil. She locks herself in the bathroom again after that - because what if he is? What if her soulmate is actually Satan? What does that say about her?

All these twists and mental back-flips lead her to here: standing in Lucifer's apartment, staring at him naked. She's so shocked that for a moment she forgets entirely about the abnormality of the situation. She can feel her heart stuttering in her chest, her breath catching in her throat, as her eyes wander involuntarily up and down his body, before drifting to the space behind his shoulders.

Her stomach plummets as she sees nothing but empty air. All this - she doesn't know what to call it, but all _this_ \- has been for nothing. The last few weeks have given her time to adjust to the idea, she guesses, because she never thought it would hurt this bad to lose her soulmate - even the idea of him.

He doesn't notice her discomfort, laughing at her even as she throws him a towel. He's got nothing to be ashamed of, that's for sure - and he knows it - but she can't bring herself to joke back at him as she usually does.

"I mean, look at me," he teases, turning slowly on the spot to show off his physique.

There are two marks on his back - raw pink-red crescents at the edges of his shoulder blades. They're fresher than hers - a few years rather than decades - but they're _there_. Chloe's pretty sure her heart flatlines for several seconds. The world seems to twist and narrow, pressure tightening in her chest.

"Lucifer..." the words stick in her chest, expanding and blocking the air to her lungs. She stumbles, grappling for the counter-top beside her. He's there beside her suddenly, holding her up, guiding her to sit in one of the bar stools. She shrinks away instinctively.

"Are you...okay?" She looks up; for the first time he looks awkward, worried. It's almost laughable.

"Your back," she manages. Now that she's seated everything seems slightly less daunting - at least, the floor isn't rocking underneath her feet.

"Oh, right, yes - that's where I cut my wings off."

Her hand reach involuntarily towards him, to touch the marks she recognises with aching familiarity because she sees them most days in the mirror, but he snatches hold of her wrist before her fingers meet skin.

"Don't. Please." His eyes are fractured, and something Chloe can't quite identify lies thickly in his words - a vulnerability that looks simply alien on his face.

Before she can think better of it she stands, pulling off her shirt and turning to face away from him. The silence in the air is so heavy and dense she could probably cut it with a butter knife. She can't hear him, or see him; after a few moments she's pretty sure he's left the room entirely, until suddenly his fingers brush against the scar tissue, and all of her body is alight with electricity. Her breath hitches as he traces the edges of the marks with delicate, almost nervous strokes.

"No." The word is breathed quieter than a whisper, so quiet she barely catches it despite the surrounding silence. She spins around as Lucifer snatches back his hand like he's been burned. "I- I can't," he stutters, eyes wide and terrified like a deer caught in headlights.

"Lucifer-" she reaches out to grasp his arm, to keep him there. Now that she's found him, now that they're here, together, she realises with the desperation of a drowning man that she doesn't ever want to let go.

He evades her hands, leaving her clutching at air, and once again she's entirely alone.


End file.
